Paradise Alley (18 page)

“I was rebuffed in Rome by His Holy Father, and scolded by the
Times
of London for my unwavering support of the Union,” he informed me, holding up a copy of the
Tribune
from last Friday.

“Yet look what your Mr. Greeley taxes me with. ‘
Your people for years have been and today are foremost in the degradation and abuse of this persecuted race.
' My people! Sir, it is too much to bear!”

There was a glimmer of the old fierceness in his face.

“The Church supports order and authority—even in a
Protestant
country. You may tell your employer what I said from the pulpit last year. The people themselves should
insist
upon being drafted, so as to finally bring this awful war to a close.”

He fell back to work on his reply to Greeley, leaning avidly over the writing table again. I was dismissed with a wave of his beringed hand—a streak of gold shimmering for a moment in the sunlight. Dagger John scribbling furiously with his pen, determined to make one last point.

Father Knapp walked me back outside. We paused at the gate of the empty churchyard, listening again to the the Mass still going on inside St. Patrick's.

“So—there will be no trouble?” I asked him.

“Is that what you think?”

“But—what the Archbishop said—”

“His Grace does not see it, he is confined here.” His voice trailing off as he gazed back toward the Archbishop's little brick rectory. “He has heard
so many
false things about his people in the past.”

It struck me that it was not really Hughes at all who had wanted to talk to me, but Father Knapp himself. He is a short, stocky man, built solid as a cannon shot, but with eyes that look pained from squinting; his dirty-blond hair turning grey at the temples. A truly self-effacing man, with no ambitions that I knew of beyond his parish. Attending the Archbishop now only because he happens to hail from Annaloghan, Hughes's own village back in Tyrone.

“It's an injustice, what's being done to them—making men go off to war because they can't pay their way out of it,” he said, shaking his head. “But no matter what, nothing must happen. Justice or no, it'll be a black mark against us that will never wash out.”

“What will the church do, then?”

He held out his hands, palms up. It was not so much a shrug as a gesture of despair.

“Everything we can.
Everything
we can. But—you've seen the people, you see how they feel.”

“That is all you can promise? It isn't even a promise!”

He looked at me impatiently for the first time.

“And what about you, Mr. Robinson? What would you say to them?”

“Well—”

“Tell me, sir: Have you bought a substitute for yourself? Or are you waiting to see how the draft turns out?”

“I—I didn't have to. I'm exempted. As a war correspondent,” I stammered, as idiotic as it sounded.

But if I were not? Brokerage houses have sprung up all over the City now. They advertise in the newspapers, offering to handle the distasteful business of buying a substitute, a man to go to war for you. Everything is taken care of, you don't even have to know the man's name unless you want to.

Meanwhile, other cities have set up booths in our public parks, trying to fill their draft quotas with our young men. They offer competitive bonuses to anyone who will enlist for good old Cincinnati, or Elmira. There are even rumors of certain dens, down in Greenwich Village, or over on West Cherry Street, where bounty brokers drug young men and turn them over to the highest bidder—

Why not? It would hardly be the first time human flesh was sold in this City. Nor the last—

I wanted to explain myself. I wanted to tell Father Knapp that this is what I do. That this is my role, that I observe and I tell—from a distance—just as he dispenses charity and redemption.

But at that moment the Mass finished. The congregation spilling out into the churchyard, blinking in the harsh summer sunlight. Their voices low, and urgent. Looking for some sort of counsel in these times of crisis—not wanting to hear, I imagined, that
they
should insist the government draft them.

“A war correspondent, eh?” Father Knapp said to me, smiling grimly. “Well, you may find yourself back on the front lines tomorrow.”

•
23
•

And so I am, back here on the front lines—if you can call it that. Right now there are no bullets, but monsters loom above us. Immense and skeletal, their mouths open, their claws extended in fury. But no one is intimidated. (This mob has seen worse.) They greet these creatures cheerfully, doffing their caps as they pass. Calling out with the same black humor they displayed at the draft:

“Yer lookin' up, O'Connell!”

“Say, don't that look like Jameson durin' the hunger?”

We have wandered into the new central park, where Prof. Hawkins set up his plaster casts of dinosaur fossils. They are one of the favorite recreations of the City, a place where fathers of all classes bring their little boys to scramble up along the plaster bones, and fight epic battles with the behemoths.

The mob passes them with more cheers and waves. There are thousands marching now, women as well as men, choking the primitive new streets as they stream in from both east and west. They lie insolently along the grass of the new park, scattering their bottles and scraps of food, and butcher's paper, along the immaculate raked paths.

“
. . . . Lincoln,
this Nero, this Caligula, this
despot!
” some impromptu street-corner orator is already fulminating, perched atop an orange crate. Let these Irish pause for five minutes and one of them will give you a speech.

Yet the crowd begins to gather 'round him, as eager as ever to hear any political blather. I recognize the speaker—a shyster lawyer who moved to the City a few years ago from Virginia.

“Resist the draft! Organize to resist it! Name your leader—and if necessary
I
will become your leader!”

They applaud lustily, cheering, “That's the talk!,” and “To hell with old Abe!” There is a call for three groans for the President, and for Greeley, and then three cheers for Jeff Davis, and General McClellan, their perpetual hero.

Like all mobs, they hunger after false idols. I met Davis in Washington, when he was Pierce's secretary of war—a vain, nervous man, hiding his skittishness behind a pompous Bourbon formality. McClellan even worse. I saw him at Bellevue, after I'd come back from Fredericksburg with some of the wounded. He seemed to me a perfect stage general then—puffing his chest out, strutting around from bed to bed. Sticking out a hand to each suffering, jaundiced soldier, and bellowing, “Well, now! What's the matter with
you,
my man?” I pray that he will never be entrusted with any of our armies again.

But none of this would matter to the mob in the park even if they knew it. Like children saying naughty words, they just want to say the most shocking things they can hurl at the Republicans. They flop on the lawn, lolling around as if they were at some Tammany chowder.

Poor rubes. Poor rough, tanned faces from the Five Points and the Arch Block, from Paradise Square and Gotham Court, and Cat Alley and the Shambles. They could be straight out of the Middle Ages, peasants on a pilgrimage, or a crusade. Milling about openmouthed. They never get to such precincts, to Olmsted's wonderful new park with its plaster monsters, its carefully sodded grass and fairy bridges, and tender saplings and scenic rock overhangs.

Maddy's people.
They came upon us as a storm—or a plague, brought by boats, as plagues always are. There were always some Irish in the City, just as there has always been some of everybody. Most of them were from Ulster—shopkeepers and shipwrights, carpenters and butchers; hardworking, respectable, Presbyterian and dull.

Then, one day, on the eve of winter, there was a half-naked woman with her baby at her teat, begging in the middle of Broadway. There have always been beggars in the City, but somehow this was
more shocking. The leatherheads quickly bundled her away, but the next week she was back, and then there was another, and another. Wild, desperate-looking women, children clutching their skirts as they stared blindly up into the passing crowds, imploring them for a coin, or a piece of bread.

Now they do everything in our City, all the hard jobs, the mean jobs, the jobs that must be done—after they had literally flung the Negroes out of them. They are our stable hands, our draymen, our maids, and our cooks; our hod-carriers and brick-layers, our charwomen and hacks. The men and women who cut our meat, and cook our food, who sell us our oysters and pour us our drinks. Who build our homes, and unload our ships, and shovel our shit. And they are the men who put out our fires, and keep the peace on our streets.

I sit on the grass among them, now, clinging to my disguises.
Feeling so sorry for them, and wishing they would vanish—

“And may I be the next glorious martyr upon the altar of my country's freedom!”

The soapbox speaker is still pontificating, but the crowd is bored now. The Provost's office is still closed, and they have no ready victim to attack. They start to drift away, into the vast green beauty of the new park, and I am seized with the hope that we may be rescued after all, that their whole incipient insurrection will simply fizzle out.

Just then some rough beast staggers down one of the gravel paths. He is grizzled and hideous, looking more like a bear than a man. His clothes torn and covered with mud, head covered with terrible red boils that stick up through his clumps of hair. His eyes go wide with fear or amazement as he stumbles upon us, and seeing him the men near me start to hoot with glee.

“Hey, look, it's Mose!”

Slowly, the rest of the mob begins to take it up.

“Mose, it's Mose!”

They begin to crowd around him, laughing and jeering. Their drift halted by this new amusement.

“Keep your old Abraham, here's our
Mose!
”

Christening him with the name of that old stage perennial, Mose the Bowery Boy, hero of the gangs and the firemen. The beast himself only continues to stare at them, his eyes narrowing, but
more and more men take up the chant. They offer a whiskey bottle up to him, and some young buck tries to loop a chain with a plank of wood attached to it around his neck, the words NO DRAFT! chalked on it.

Like a bear baited beyond endurance, the creature comes suddenly to life. He swats the
b'hoy
to the ground and seizes the plank at the same time, his movements stunningly fast and effective. He holds the chunk of wood threateningly above his head, and for a moment the crowd falls back.

It is only then that he stares at the plank, as if parsing out the words written there. A small, malicious smile seems to spread across his face, and then he loops the chain deliberately over his shoulders himself, beckoning for the whiskey bottle again. He takes a long draught from it and the crowd cheers and surges up around him again, pushing him to their front.

While they are still celebrating their new champion, a young boy dashes into the park, ducking and dodging around the plaster monsters. He has something dark, dirt or blood, smeared over half his face—could even be the same boy I saw earlier, while stepping up onto the streetcar. Though all these Irish look alike to me—

Grinning up into the sun, as he wiped the blood across his mouth—

“The conscript! The conscript!” he is crying now. “They're startin' it again! The conscript! At the Provost's office!”

At once the mob is on the move again. Still laughing, but marching with a purpose now—their new-crowned Mose leading them on. A smirking young thug falls in beside him, holding up an American flag he has stolen from somewhere, staff and all. On his other side one of the kitchen-pot drummers steps up, banging away with his ladle. The three of them forming a crude mockery of the Spirit of '76, that staple tableau of so many Fourth of July picnics. The crowd gets the joke, they roar their approval as the trio leads them back down along the tracks of the New Haven railroad in the Fourth Avenue.

“To the Provost's!” they shout. “Mose to the Provost's!”

I cannot believe the conscription office has really opened up.
Are they mad?
The mob, so jolly, will turn in an instant once they get to it—

There is the sound of a bell ringing, loudly and persistently, behind us. A sudden surge of hope, and relief.
Can this be—Kennedy's men, come at last?

But no—it is only the 8:57 from Stamford, pushing its way slowly along the rails. Its prosperous-looking patrons, men and women, peering out the windows in bewilderment at the ragged mob that blocks their way.

The crowd good-naturedly makes way for the cars. Some of the men sweeping off their hats, gesturing grandly at the staring passengers. A few even grab a ride on the cowcatcher, hooting and whistling for their friends to look at them. Still the train keeps moving slowly forward, the locomotive and its twelve cars nearly past—when it comes to the attention of their new leader.

They try to pull him out of the way, afraid for his life, but he swats them away as easily as he did the first
b'hoy.
Standing there now in the tracks so implacably that the train must grind to a complete halt. The engineer furiously clanging his bell and pulling on his whistle—to no avail. The creature ignores him, staring grimly straight ahead. The train slowly cutting its steam until it finally goes dead, the last futile huffs of its engine slowly fading away.

Only then does he walk slowly off the tracks. And now, as the train sits there, building up its steam again, the creature takes a crowbar from one of the longshoremen in the mob, and pries a paving stone loose from the street. Still moving deliberately, completely unhurried—so that none of us, the mob, or the train's passengers, or its engineer can quite believe what we are seeing. Until he hoists up the paving stone—half as long as his arm, cut from solid, Massachusetts granite—and heaves it through the window of the first passenger car.

For a moment we stand there in disbelief. Then everyone is shouting in one ancient voice. The mob prying up more paving stones, grabbing any loose brick or piece of wood or garbage they can find and hurling it at the train.

The locomotive shrieks, and blows its steam, beginning to lurch forward again. But now the mobs stays with it, harrying it like wild Indians, like primitive hunters pursuing some great beast. Bombarding it with stones, and garbage, smashing all its windows. It barely gets away, puffing and hissing on down to the Grand Central Station. And as it does I see its passengers again, now huddled together in the aisles. Peering out from behind the seats at the scene around them, their eyes filled with terror at the alien City they have ridden into.